Eric Ekholm

RAG time

I’m both an AI optimist and an AI skeptic. I use AI tools in my day-to-day work, mostly to help with coding, but with some other tasks as well. Google Gemini is one of the tabs I open, along with my email and calendar, as soon as I boot

Reaction to Emily Oster's "why we need test scores"

Programming Note: I’m doing an intensive AI training next week, so there will be no post on 4/4. I’ll be back again the following week. Emily Oster recently published an article (post? blog?) on her website, ParentData, titled “Why We Still Need Test Score Data,” and I

Writing for busy readers, and why not to use AI

I recently read The Productivity Shift (TPS) – a report from Grammarly with the basic premise that businesses should use AI to help employees communicate better, which will increase productivity. You can skim the report if you want, but it’s mostly a lengthy marketing pitch for Grammarly – a company that

When do predictions about students' future performance help?

One common use of statistical models is to make predictions about the future. These predictions are ubiquitous in our tech-infused lives today. Meteorologists deliver predictions about the weather to you via the apps on your phone. Your credit card company might flag a transaction as suspicious using a prediction from

Does your data's structure match the question you want to answer?

I have this thesis that people in education often get frustrated with data – or they feel like data is useless – because the structure of the data they’re collecting doesn’t allow them to answer the question they want to answer. This usually happens because someone – a principal, a social

Reviewing VDOE's school performance framework (pt 3)

In the last two posts in this mini-series reviewing Virginia’s new school performance framework, I shared my thoughts on its mastery and growth components. I’d encourage you to check out those posts if you haven’t, but my quick summary of them is that I think the mastery

Reviewing VDOE's school performance framework (pt 2)

In my last post, I wrote about the mastery component of Virginia’s new school performance framework. I’m more or less optimistic about that component of the framework in that it’s straightforward to calculate and the weighting of different proficiency levels feels generous (particularly when compared to a

Reviewing VDOE's school performance framework (pt 1)

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) recently – within the past year or so – completely revamped their school performance and accreditation system. I’m not going to describe all of the changes in detail, but the gist is that we now have 2 different systems – an accreditation system and a “school

Graphs should be opinionated

I mentioned in last week’s post that people often think of quantitative data as objectively true. Not always, but often. And I'll grant that there is something compelling about seeing some phenomenon bundled up into a tidy, concise metric, some little nugget that we can carry around

Do less, document more

Documentation is like sleep. It’s unsexy. It’s boring. It feels like it gets in the way of doing more. It eats up time that you could be using to do something else, something more productive. And yet, if you skimp on it, you always regret it. Maybe not

Two and a half uses for student addresses

Student addresses are an interesting, and largely untapped, data point. They’re mostly seen as something that a school district's transportation department needs for creating bus routes...and that’s pretty much it. But there are a handful of cases I can think of where addresses provide us

Is your data worth its cost?

Back in high school, I ran track and cross country. Every Sunday, my teammates and I would meet somewhere to do our long runs, which typically ranged anywhere from 6 to 15 miles, depending on where we were in our training cycle.  I grew up in Northern Virginia, which, despite